Читать книгу The Household Guide to Dying - Debra Adelaide - Страница 12

Dear Delia

I’ve consulted numerous cookbooks but despite many attempts I still can’t manage to boil a soft egg. Can you help? I wonder if I should Google it?

A Bachelor.

Dear A Bachelor

You are asking me to impart one of my best secrets. Go Google all you like. I worked it out, I’m sure you can too.

I’d started another list. I should have been concentrating on the real work, but I felt an irrational urgency about this. I would finish it then put it in one of the boxes I was preparing for the girls.

Guests (needs separate list: obviously can’t be done now)

Invitations: suggest professional printers

Cake: refer to recipe (but maybe Jean?)

Dress: David Jones’s best?

Photographer: god knows. Maybe digital cameras will be obsolete by now?

Catering: Benny’s the obvious choice. But Cater Queen if not poss.

Venue: depends on time of year. Back garden perfect if summer/spring.

Musicians: string trio (students from college?)

Ideally this list wouldn’t be needed for another twenty years. Ideally, if it were entirely up to me, it would never be needed, since I was beginning to sense the redundancy of marriage. But as I didn’t feel it was right to impose my views on anyone else, even my own daughters – especially my own daughters – then it would be better than no list.

Along with everything else it offers (a chance for relatives to catch up, a good excuse for a booze-up), a wedding is a means for a certain level of bonding between mother and daughter. Fraught bonding at times (I remembered it well), but a rite of passage that should not be denied at any cost, no matter the jaded views of the older generation. No matter that the mother would not be there.

That my daughters would not need this list for many years was irrelevant. All that mattered was that they’d know I’d made the effort. And if by then they happened to be capable of organising a wedding without my assistance, then even better. In fact, I’d regard it as a significant sign that the mothering I’d managed to squeeze into the years available was successful.

Archie had recently called me a control freak. I think it was the day after I’d written that late-night list to help him get the girls to school. As I sat at my desk with the preliminary list for the wedding of my youngest daughter, who was just eight, a wedding that might never occur, and which I certainly wouldn’t be attending, I confronted this accusation. If all this wasn’t the work of a control freak, then what was? I tapped my lips with the pen and gazed out the window at the wisteria. I decided that Estelle was probably in no need of any such list, being supremely organised herself. Also of firm opinions, already, regarding matrimony. It was Daisy I was planning for, though with built-in flexibility if Estelle should turn out to surprise us all.

Them all.

I wondered if these lists said more about me or Archie. I’d spent too many mornings, more than I cared to remember, explaining to him what needed to be done: instructing, directing, losing my temper, becoming impatient, before finally doing it all myself. As if I’d been at the control centre of a military exercise, a full-scale war, instead of a partner in a marriage that included two young children. Occasionally, the children had been dressed and fed (if you counted crisps as food) and otherwise organised out of the house and off to childcare, lately school, without my help. But the fallout had never been worth it:

Daisy: I didn’t get a merit star today because I forgot my home reader.

Estelle: Miss Blake says if I don’t take my permission note back I won’t get to see the

Dreamtime storyteller.

D: I was cold, why didn’t you pack my jumper?

E: You know I hate blueberry muffins!

And so on. I tried every method available to the reasonable woman. Pointing out the lapses in a kind way (‘Darling, don’t you think Daisy should have her shoelaces tied?’). Barking out orders like a sergeant-major (‘If you don’t take them NOW they’ll be marked late!’). Saying nothing. Saying everything. Standing by pretending to be preoccupied with another task but internally writhing as Archie tried to brush hair that was still plaited or failed to understand that children needed reminding to wear sweaters even in the middle of winter. Writing lists. Not writing lists. Doing none of the tasks. Doing half the tasks, like lining up the contents of a lunchbox so that he only had to place them inside, close the lid and grab the juice bottle from the fridge. Daddy packed my lunch today.

Nothing worked. Now I was playing my very last card. It was a mean trick, I knew. I felt its meanness myself. How cruel, how unfair, how totally unsporting, how unlike the stout mothers of public life, the mothers of fiction. You could never imagine Mrs Gandhi or Mrs Micawber or Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Weasley dying before their time and leaving their children unmothered. The prime minister’s wife – any prime minister’s wife – Nicole Kidman’s mother, Mrs Jellyby, Angelina Jolie, the Queen, Lady Jane Franklin, Mrs George Bush senior and junior…they would never have died young and left motherless children. They might have been doubtful, dominating or dysfunctional – all Dickens’ mothers were – but they stayed around. Even Lady Dedlock hung in there. Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet would never have left five young daughters weeping over a coffin. The mother dying was a disgraceful breaking of every single rule and if I were Archie, I would have been outraged too. But that wasn’t going to change, and it certainly wasn’t my idea.

I wondered if my absence would make any real difference to the running of the household. As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Like Mrs Isabella Beeton I had applied a strategic approach to the household, its contents, its routines, and its warm and breathing occupants. And how had I forgotten that Isabella Beeton, that wise, visionary, wellread, innovative woman, that young woman, had died far too early? Isabella Beeton had left her two children – one just a baby – motherless. She ought always to remember that she is the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega in the government of her establishment.

But what once infuriated me about Archie I now admired. It hadn’t been his tendency to dally in flirtatious territory at dinners or parties featuring women with more impressive cleavage than I – and of course, more recently, with cleavage at all. Nor had it been his need to bond with members of the same gender and subspecies (semi-professional, rugby-loving) at the pub once a week. Nor his regular forgetting of birthdays and anniversaries. If this marriage were to have unravelled it would have been over something as trivial and tangible as a misplaced sock, or a forgotten school lunchbox. That indifference to the knitted fabric of the household. It might have been misshapen over time and ill-fitting but still, thanks to the one thread that was me, it all held together: the shopping, the bill-paying, the girls’ activities, their dental appointments, their swimming lessons, their need to dawdle in the park doing nothing at all.

However, I now saw a quality that I almost craved. Maybe Archie’s indifference to the household was restraint, a capacity for self-control and wide-gazing detachment. Something I couldn’t do, being forever focused on the crumbs on the kitchen bench in front of me, the emptying milk carton in the fridge, the multiplying dirty clothes in the basket.

I once heard a famous actor being interviewed on the radio about the breakdown of her marriage. When pressed to name its cause she replied succinctly: shirts. I knew instantly what she meant. The symbol of a married woman’s unscripted yet unavoidable role in the relationship. No clause in the contract stipulating the care and maintenance of the male shirt, yet somehow they took over, with their demands to be soaked, ironed, fresh and alert on hangers ready for the next excursion into the working world. It took a stout feminist to withstand the onslaught of the shirt.

My particular argument had never been with shirts, since Archie’s work gear was casual. And even if it had been, I would never have left him over a shirt because, despite his domestic blindness, Archie had given me more than I deserved. But there had been times when I could see how it might have been possible to leave. I doubted he had ever understood how tight a thread I had been all these years. And now that one thread was about to be snipped. And if on the very edge of that scission, I was still unable to fall back, stop being the commander of the household, what did that say about me? Control freak, I guessed. Yet I suspected there was something more to it than that. Yet another thing for which I could not find the right words.

I wondered what happened when women disappeared from a family. Another woman enlisted to take their place? A paid housekeeper, or a wife? Despite his occasional flirtatiousness I couldn’t see Archie rushing into anything. That didn’t fit with the father in him. I knew he would be assisted by his mother and my mother, who between them would probably make life easier for him than I ever had. Then, after a while, depending on how Estelle and Daisy reacted, a new partner would come, followed possibly by marriage. Secretly I was hoping for Charlotte, Archie’s part-time bookkeeper, which seemed logical to me, although I’d tried and failed to discuss the subject with him. I liked Charlotte, I admired her. She was a serene young woman who was completing a diploma in business management. She worked with percentages and bottom lines and, I suspected, had never made a sponge cake or done French knitting in her life. She came one day a week and worked in the corner of Archie’s shed which was also his office, sending out invoices and settling accounts with suppliers, decoding then dispensing all the paperwork of the tax system that Archie found so mystifying. Estelle and Daisy adored her and only ever wanted her to mind them if Archie and I went out. If she married Archie it would be almost perfect.

Oh, and it would be cruel. Another woman to usher the girls into their teenage years, into their adulthood. To be there for their first period, to buy the most expensive hair products, to offer advice on skin care, to tolerate teenagegirl cravings for Nutella or obsessions with vegan diets. To pretend to understand how vital MySpace was. To be there when their boyfriends abandoned them. Gasp at their mobile phone bills. Shake a head over their newest piercing. Tell them, every day, how beautiful they were. And how much they were loved.

Cruelty. What exactly did Eliot say again? I found my undergraduate copy of the Selected Poems, and prepared to torment myself further with his gloomy words. But when I read ‘The Wasteland’ again I had to admit that Mr Eliot was right: it was winter that had kept me warm, in a strange sort of way. Muffled me in its state of suspended animation, kept me from the cold steel of memory and desire before they sliced through my soul in the expectant warmth of spring.

An attack of wind shook the wisteria so furiously the petals rained onto the verandah. Opening the office window wide I took in its scent. I heard the clicking of Mr Lambert’s wheelbarrow next door. This time of year, he was more than particular about his garden: he was obsessive. He would be sweeping up the leaves and blown petals as they dropped, cursing my messy flowering vines and clipping every tendril that sneaked its way past the fence. Instead of shaving his front lawn today, he was probably pruning, the mock orange hedge being his chief target. I never smelled the mock orange during the day, but some nights the entire atmosphere was saturated with it. It could not be just from Mr Lambert’s abject specimens, which he trimmed into order every week in the warmer months.

Winter would soon be just a chill memory. The scent on the wind told me that. It might have been the freesias, planted around the letterbox. The fragrance always filled me with a strange distracted yearning, a restless and aching expectation. Perhaps because it contained the promise of summer, the season I loved the most. I remembered the freesias which grew along the railway embankments and in vacant lots all the way down the south coast. The ones that filled a room with a scent at once wild and comforting. They brought suggestions of many things: memories of rough childhood holidays on the south coast beaches; weekends away in holiday shacks with friends; the evidence of the first garden I ever helped plan, plant and nurture into life, when we first came to live here. The garden hadn’t existed then: the house perched disdainfully at the front of a long narrow stretch of buffalo grass. There was a Hills hoist rotary washing line, immobilised by age, and nothing else. We brought clumps of the wild freesias and, after hacking away at the grass to uncover cracked but serviceable paths and the faint outlines of former garden beds, planted them here and there.

For all the years I caught their first scent each spring, I experienced a small stab deep within. A distinct physical ache, and one that always made me feel momentarily emotional, though whether on the verge of tears or shouts or laughter, I could never say. This seasonal feeling was so common I had always registered it unthinkingly. Until now. For I would no longer smell these flowers, and it seemed important to define accurately what the scent meant. And it wasn’t only the freesias. All the spring flowers taunted me in their postcard perfection, as unwelcome as the memory and desire that now encroached on the day. They all seemed to have come out of the dead land, the garden that I once revelled in.

On the desk beside me the phone rang.

Hello?

There was no one at the other end but I sensed a presence. I suspected it was the same person who also hung up after a few rings, before I could answer it.

Hello? I repeated more loudly, but the presence was not to be provoked by shouting. I slammed the phone down. I had no idea who it was. The caller ID function told me it was a private number.

I closed Mr Eliot, more carefully than I otherwise might, adding him to the collection of books on the bedside table. They probably wouldn’t make their way back to the bookshelves in the hall.

Dear Delia

Don has been very good to me, and my husband has neglected me for years for his work. You still didn’t advise if I should bleach my lace tablecloth or not. And as well as the red wine it is smeared with green stains where Don knocked over his avocado and prawn entrée.

Uncertain.

Dear Uncertain

Don, Don, Don. It’s all about Don, isn’t it? And why is it that you are attracted to such clumsy men? I advise you to sever relations with Don and concentrate on your husband. Maybe he works too hard because you are the sort of person who uses lace cloths and makes avocado and prawn cocktails. What were you thinking? It’s not 1975 any more. Of course soaking an antique lace cloth in bleach would be crazy. Try lots of salt, cold water, then hang it out in the sun for a day. Let me know how you go.